My party is converting from 3.5 to PF, and my level 7 character's Headband of Intellect +2 will presumably be "morphing" into a Headband of Vast Intelligence +2. On the pathfinder srd i saw the following thing about when an item granting an ability score increase becomes "permanent" (after the character wears it for 24 hours):
Permanent Bonuses: Ability bonuses with a duration greater than 1 day actually increase the relevant ability score after 24 hours. Modify all skills and statistics as appropriate. This might cause you to gain skill points, hit points, and other bonuses. These bonuses should be noted separately in case they are removed.
It also contained this clarification by James:
Clarification by James Jacobs: All bonuses are retroactive when an ability score increases, be they bonuses to damage, to skill ranks, to hit points, to saves, to skill checks... all of them. Skill ranks not being retroactive are a 3.5 convention we specifically removed from the game because it was a weird exception to the rule, and since now there are no exceptions to this rule, there's no need to specifically state that skill ranks are retroactively granted if your intelligence goes up.
The headband of vast intelligence says that it has one skill associated with it that should grant a skill rank per hit die, which in my case would amount to 7 ranks in one skill. The above paragraphs seem to suggest that the +2 int should make my character retroactively gain skill points pertaining to my new intelligence score (meaning 7 skill ranks). My question is: does my character get 7 retroactively added skill ranks AND the 7 ranks to one skill that are specifically mentioned in the item description? or are the 7 ranks in one skill supposed to be those 7 skill ranks that are granted due to the extra intelligence?
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My question is: does my character get 7 retroactively added skill ranks AND the 7 ranks to one skill that are specifically mentioned in the item description? or are the 7 ranks in one skill supposed to be those 7 skill ranks that are granted due to the extra intelligence?
I'm not a Dev, but my assumption would be that the bonus ranks are indeed the same ranks you would have gained for the +2 intelligence.
So the +2 Headband might have 'Knowledge-arcana' as it's associated skill, in which case the wearer would be treated as if he'd spent all of the ranks he would have gained from that +2 Int in Knowledge-arcana.
Any ranks that 'overlap' (say, he already had ranks in Knowledge-arcana that he'd purchased normally) do not stack, so someone who had already maxed out his Knowledge-arcana ranks would gain no additional skill ranks from this particular headband.
There is a sentence at the end of the writeup which says that headbands that do not have an associated skill give randomly assigned ranks in various knowledge skills, and I might be generous to a player and have duplicate ranks get randomly shuffled like this, so that a character that already has max ranks of Know-arcane would get some other random knowledge skill ranks instead. But that's not official, just me being generous. :)
Its just the ranks of the skill that are in the headband. They didn't want people having a generic +1 skill per level, taking it off to erase it, and then put the headband back on to pick a different skill.
This way, if you want to alternate between Acrobatics and Profession Chef, you need 2 separate headbands.
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If I were a wizard, creating such a headband, I'd probably actually not bother with knowledge-arcane or spellcraft, come to think of it, but make the headband work so that each skill rank it confers is applied to a different knowledge skill (except arcane), and then starting again at the beginning when you've got a rank of each.
Sort of a 'Headband of the Dilettante' that allows me to know a little bit about everything, without me having to spend points outside of stuff I *need* to know (even if my headband is lost), like knowledge-arcane and spellcraft. For the first nine levels, I'd gain, in order, a rank of k-dungeoneering, k-engineering, k-history, k-local, etc. At 10th level, it would start over, adding a second rank of each of these knowledges in the same order.
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thanks everyone. i figured it was something like that to avoid being able to shuffle around ranks as you please, or something. :)